Jason's blog

As our outfit continues to grow, we’re tickled out of our minds to introduce our latest hire: Harvey Jane McCloskey, consultant. She’s extremely punctual, arriving for her initial interview almost three weeks early, knows synergy, and stays on the job * for boastfully long stretches.

* Sleeping

H.J. happens to be the daughter of ENGINE’s Ben and Shanda McCloskey, but was able to earn a roster spot on merit and smallness alone. She starts first thing tomorrow, taking a co-leadership role in the division ** long headed solely by two-year-old Evie Kirk, who assures board members that Harvey Jane is both “Evie’s baby” and “a mermaid.”

** R&D

In sliiightly less exciting news, we’ve gained a few great new clients over the past week or so, and are looking forward to getting our expanding team to work.

Thing:Some Thoughts On The Three Amigos from A VC. Very many great things have been written about this week’s LeBron James sideshow — if you missed it, let’s just say it combined all the most spectacular elements of a two-year-long infomercial, a Derby horse auction, and Alexander’s invasion of India. It’s become almost cliche, but it’s true: the problem isn’t what he did, it’s how he did it. Not since Ron Burgundy has a city so unmistakably been told to go **** itself. But let’s get beyond the question of whether we’re mad at LeBron or just disappointed.

The freshest piece on the matter (the one linked to at the beginning of this rambling) frames LeBron’s decision as an experiment being conducted by LeBron. It’s like nothing we’ve seen in the sports history of America, though the word sports is superfluous — a household-name for-profit organization’s labor has taken total control of its own factory.

In X’s and O’s terms, it’s not likely to work. The team won’t have any money to afford depth, James and Dwayne Wade don’t complement so much as duplicate each other, and this might be the biggest foursome of egos since… I don’t know, the Beatles (?), if you count Heat general manager Pat Riley. But let’s say it does work… will sports ever be the same? (ht Rafi Kam.)

Thing: As a Gentile, it’s hard to know how to approach this video. A Holocaust survivor, his daughter, and two grandchildren tour former German concentration camps and Holocaust memorials — where they dance to Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.”

After watching, people tend to either feel goose-bumpy or uncomfortable. Rationally, the presence of an able-minded-and-bodied Holocaust survivor should dissuade any concerns of whether the montage is tasteful and appropriate — if he’s ok with it, you should be too. But it’s still unsettling.

And it’s all because of the song they’ve chosen. It’s an instantly mockable karaoke throwaway, for whatever reason. If they’d gone with a traditional Hebrew song, any traditional Hebrew song, even one we’ve never heard of, the video would be cool but unremarkable. Or you’d expect something like Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, whatever — no problem (since apparently men with guitars know more about the joy and power of survival than an African American woman born in the 1940s).

But because “I Will Survive” somehow has become the definitive disco song, it feels like it’s not just the wrong song, it’s almost blasphemous.

But, of course, it’s the best possible song. This man is almost literally dancing on his own grave.

Very long answer:

Angle 1: Compare Drupal's Market Share To WordPress' Market Share

Here's how the software used by the 10,000 most popular websites breaks down, according to Backend Battles, which is a website technology monitor and not a dance contest:

141 of the 10,000 most popular websites run on WordPress. 39 are based on Drupal (making them the web's two most popular content management systems). So Drupal has 27.6% of WordPress' presence on the Backend Battles list.

BuiltWith Technology Trends is similar to Backend Battles, but uses a larger sample size of 100,000 sites. According to BuiltWith as of July 2010, WordPress is used by 3.09% of websites, and Drupal is used by 1.67%. BuiltWith suggests Drupal has 54% of WordPress' user base. (Grain of salt: BuiltWith has been known to think everything's Drupal, like it's a kid in Sunday school answering every question by saying, "Um, the Bible?", but they claim they've fixed that by now.)

If we extrapolated Backend Battles' 27.6% and BuiltWith's 54% to the entire web, we could suggest that there are either 7 million or 13.6 million Drupal sites on the entire web. An average of the two would be 10.3 million. But that's likely too high. More on that in a second.

We'd arrive at these numbers by applying the Backend Battles and BuiltWith percentages (27.6% and 54%) to the number of total WordPress sites among the entire web (25.2 million as of July 2010), not just among the most popular 10,000. Because if Drupal has X% as many sites as WordPress among a sample size of 10,000 sites, it's reasonable to think the percentage would stay similar even among a set of all sites.

10.3 million: too high or too low?

On the one hand, the total number of WordPress sites includes both self-hosted sites that use WordPress software and blogs hosted on wordpress.com. The sites measured by Backend Battles and BuiltWith are the web's most heavily trafficked sites -- almost all of them are self-hosted. Most blogs hosted on wordpress.com are going to be less popular than the web's 10,000 or even 100,000 most popular sites. The density of total WordPress sites is only going to swell the deeper we go past the most popular sites. Anyone can start a wordpress.com blog in seconds, and then never touch it again. Surely that's boosted WordPress' numbers quite a bit.

Drupal, however, doesn't have any widely adopted instant-website solution. If you want a Drupal website, you've got to really want a Drupal website -- committing to downloading, installing, and setting up Drupal is a bigger barrier to entry than WordPress usage faces. (Drupal's trying out Gardens as a quick-and-easy, WordPressy, hosted-for-you deal, but it's not likely to catch on because the freaking URL is drupalgardens.com.

On the other hand,as this Joomla chart suggests, open-source CMS usage tends to be more prevalent once you venture past the top 100,000 sites, though perhaps none more so than wordpress.com-hosted blogs.

Brain hurts. Here's what's happening: cutting that Drupal average by 20%, a totally arbitrary number, to account for the wordpress.com thing.

Angle 1 result: 8.24 million Drupal sites.

Another web software monitoring site we considered, W3Techs, was way out there: Drupal has only 11% of WordPress' presence. On its face, that's not totally unreasonable -- 11% of WordPress' 25.2 million sites would suggest there are about 3 million Drupal sites, which is much lower than the others but not outrageous. However, they're only counting domains, not subdomains, meaning their numbers would only give WordPress credit for its 13.8 self-hosted sites, not its 11.4 wordpress.com-hosted sites. And 11% of 13.8 million is only a million and a half A MILLION AND HALF. As we'll get to in Angle 3, Drupal was downloaded more times than that during the third-biggest year of its shelf life, let alone its other eight and a half years A MILLION AND A HALF.

Angle 2: Look At What People Are Searching For

According to Google Trends as of July 2010, WordPress gets searched 3.2 times more often than Drupal does. Even though WordPress appears to be soaring while Drupal plateaus (we’d prefer the term consistent, even though Drupal clearly was Googled more in 2009 than it was in 2008), the difference is between 2.1 x and 3.5 x for every calendar year so far. Therefore, WordPress has had about 3.2 times the popular interest Drupal has had. Popular interest is relevant here because more searches are going to mean more downloads/signups YES I KNOW not directly, but I can’t imagine how there wouldn’t be some kind of correlation there. (Then again, Joomla was searched more often than WordPress was for three straight years, and there aren’t as many Joomla sites as there are WordPress sites; Joomla has been downloaded 14 million times since 2007 according to joomla.org as of May 2010 in a long string of prepositional phrases without a comma. A fine number if it’s accurate, but not enough to approach 25.2 million. Sometimes all you can do is throw your hands in the air and proceed as planned. Watch me do that in the very next paragraph.)

Assuming X number of searches translates to Y number of new sites, we can again use the 25.2 million total WordPress sites as a base point. Dividing 25.2 million by 3.2 gives us 7.9 million, remarkably close to our 8.24 million estimate from Angle 1. Now let’s dock it by OHGOSHSAY 20%, because of the previously noted wordpress.com-hosted thing.

Angle 2 result: 6.32 million Drupal sites.

Angle 3: Expand On What We Know About Drupal Download Stats

Our first two angles depend pretty much entirely on the data that the WordPress organization has chosen to release to the public. They’re not known exaggerators, but our whole house of cards would be zoning violation’d if their numbers were off. So let’s try and do one independent of WordPress.

That’s almost 2.5 million downloads right there. More than two years have passed since the most recent update. If downloads continued at 2008’s pace, that would equal 5.7 million downloads, plus whatever happened between 2001 and 2005 — let’s say ~300,000 total for Drupal’s first four years. That might seem conservative, but it still adds up to 6 million. Of course, there’s reason to believe (based on our sources for Angles 1 and 2, plus other factors*) that demand for Drupal has risen in the past two years, so 6 million is too low.

Sure, a Drupal download doesn’t equal a new Drupal site. There are many reasons why a download wouldn’t end up becoming a full-fledged site — people could download just to try out Drupal or test a module, for example. But let’s say this is balanced by: (A) one download could spawn 1,000 sites if a developer was so inclined — none of which are counted here, (B) there are plenty of other places besides drupal.com from which to download Drupal (if we felt like it, we could host it for download right here), (C) there are dozens of custom Drupal distributions like Acquia, iSite Essentials, Open Publish, and Pressflow that aren’t counted (D) alpha, beta, and release candidate downloads — most of which could yield a fully functioning site — aren’t counted, and so on.

Bumping that 6 million up by 1 million to account for Drupal’s increase in popularity since 2008 is very reasonable. Downloads almost tripled between 2007 and 2008, and we’re certainly estimating a much less aggressive rate of increase than that. Yep, that puts us right within range of our previous two estimates, which might seem like we’re forcing the numbers to fit. But, using 6 million as our base number, how many do you suggest we add to account for Drupal’s mini-surge of 2009 and, to a lesser extent, 2010?

Angle 3 result: At least 7 million Drupal sites.

Crappy, Discarded Angle: Search For How Many Sites Still Have The “Powered By Drupal” Badge

Every stock Drupal install includes a little footer badge with the Drupal logo and some alt text that reads, “Powered by Drupal, an open source content management system.” Most people take it down; some people leave it be. You’d think searching for this would be useful — no, not really. Depending on the search engine (and, seemingly, the time of day, ozone levels over Nepal, and LeBron James’ number of Twitter followers) it returns anywhere from 60 million results to 40,000. There are nowhere near 60 million Drupal sites that haven’t removed their showroom stickers yet, and there are a whole lot more than 40,000.

Even using Yahoo! Site Explorer and filtering to only include sites that link back to drupal.org, as the badge does, isn’t helpful. I tried several different variations of the same kind of search, all of which wound up under 100,000.

Angle 4: Fly Everything Up The Flagpole And See Who Salutes

Averaging the results from all three previous reasonable angles — because why not? — gives us 7.19 million. And until somebody comes up with a better idea, that’s our answer. Please come up with a better idea.

We estimate there are about 7.19 million Drupal sites, and we’re not as un-confident about that as you might think we should be. Your turn?

Last year, high school science teacher Ron Dantowitz of Brookline, Mass., played a clever trick on three of his best students. He asked them to plan a hypothetical mission to fly onboard a NASADC-8 aircraft and observe a spacecraft disintegrate as it came screaming into Earth’s atmosphere. How would they record the event? What could they learn?
For 6 months, they worked hard on their assignment, never suspecting the surprise Dantowitz had in store.
On March 12th, he stunned them with the news: “The mission is real, and you’re going along for the ride.”

THING:The Making of OutKast’s Aquemini from Creative Loafing. If you’re me, then you barely made it through that headline before clicking on it. However, please report back on how long it took you to click if you are, in fact, not me. Big Boi’s debut solo album drops this week, and at least one-fourth of our staff is very excited about that.

Bonus Patriotic Bonus

Via SBN, the best fake documentary trailer you’ll wish was a trailer for a real movie all season:

Imported all content (including most recent webform submissions and what have you).

Adjusted inline page tools capabilities, including the arrangement of them all into a single tidy block.

Reworked a custom Trumba calendar module to be Drupal 6 compatible.

General blocks, menus, templates, and modules Drupalery.

And so on and so forth.

Here you can see the site’s old header, which didn’t match the rest of the university website’s layout, menu functionality, and visuals. Its many orange elements veered from the classic Husky purple and gold — and web-friendly gray — color scheme, leaving the Career Center’s decor looking a little wrong. (The new header can be seen in the image above.) Note that we didn’t design the new header and footer; we implemented it into CSS:

This is the site’s former footer:

And this is how the footer, redesigned by Career Center staff, looks after ENGINE’s assistance:

Bottom line: we’re very proud to now be associated — even if it’s in a very, very small way — with one of the nation’s oldest, most productive, and largest universities. If we may be so bold, we’re already looking forward to getting our next chance to lend our skills to another incredible academic institution.